In his travelogue Rambles in Éirinn (first published in 1907 but just reissued by Merrion Press), William Bulfin describes an attempt one “lovely Sunday morning in the early autumn” to cycle from Dublin to Glendalough.
The plan is quickly derailed, however, because before they get as far as Dalkey, Bulfin’s companion – never named but probably, as we’ll see later, a future founding father of the State – suggests a brief side-trip that ends up taking several hours:
“[M]y comrade, who knows many different types of Irish people, said casually that there were two men living in a tower down somewhere to the left who were creating a sensation in the neighbourhood.
“They had, he said, assumed a hostile attitude towards the conventions of denationalization, and were, thereby, outraging the feelings of the seoníní.”
Escape artist — Harry Houdini in Ireland
A Game of Two Calves (and several cows): Frank McNally on Patrick Kavanagh’s imagination, mysterious street names, and a bovine legend
Detour de Force – Frank McNally on William Bulfin’s unwitting side-trip into literary history
Barroom Bard – Frank McNally on the fictional Mr Dooley, whose thoughts were once required reading in the White House
In the event, Bulfin and his friend met three people in the tower: an Oxford student who had become a “most strenuous nationalist”; a gregarious poet of “keen grim humour”; and another poet who didn’t say much but, when they all went up onto the roof together, “disposed himself restfully to drink in the beauty of the morning”.
Bulfin did not name the trio, or indeed the place. But we now know he was in the Martello Tower at Sandycove, and that his hosts that morning would later be immortalised in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
The quiet poet, ironically, was Joyce himself. The talkative one was Oliver St John Gogarty, soon to be renamed “Buck Mulligan”. As for the Oxford nationalist, that was Richard Chenevix Trench, called “Haines” in Ulysses, whose nightmare about a black panther also features in the book’s opening scenes.
That was an excuse for Gogarty to fire shots over Joyce’s bed, precipitating the author’s departure from the tower, one of many offences for which the characterisation of “Buck” would take revenge. The gun was Trench’s and probably the same one he used when taking his own life a few years later.
It would be another 10 years before Joyce started writing Ulysses, and 18 before it was published. In the meantime, having unwittingly witnessed the makings of literary history, Bulfin reflected on the tower visit mainly as an example of the hazards Irish life presents to organised travel:
“One of the chief difficulties about cycling in Ireland is the start. When the morning is bright, and the roads dry, and a light wind straying idly over the fields, you prepare for a long ride with the pleasantest anticipations; but when you are ready to set out, some inducement to delay your departure will present itself, and time will steal away from you until nearly half the day is gone.”
So it was with the Glendalough cycle, Bulfin added: “The shadows were shortening for noonday when at last we got away from the tower, so we decided to go no further than Luggala.”
Such delays did not prevent him cycling 3,000 miles on his Irish odyssey, at an average of 70 a day. Given the condition of roads at the time, and even with the benefit of a state-of-the-art Wexford-made Pierce bicycle (the obligatory choice of self-respecting nationalists), this was an epic undertaking.
Bulfin joked about bicycles as topographical research assistants: “It there is a hill to be found on the road at all they will find it and report to you at once. They found the lower slope of Tara before I did and told me about it.”
But a later writer and Pierce enthusiast, Benedict Kiely, recalling a cycling tour of the northern counties in 1930s with his brother, also on Pierce bikes, said the experience convinced them that Bulfin’s efforts a generation earlier “might readily have shortened his life”.
Maybe they did. Bulfin was barely 40 when he visited the Martello, but he wouldn’t live to see Ulysses, or indeed to witness the Easter Rising, in which his son Eamon raised the republican flags over the GPO. Catching pneumonia on a trip to the US in early 1910, Bulfin Snr returned home to die aged only 46.
His companion on the road to Glendalough that day in 1904 did live to see Ulysses published – if only just. Or so it seems. For no sooner had the newly reissued Rambles in Éirinn dropped in my postbox recently than I also received an email from the publisher and Joycean Cormac O’Hanrahan.
As well as Joyce, O’Hanrahan’s interests include the life and work of Arthur Griffith (1871–1922), for which cause he edits an annual magazine called Cut & Paste.
In the forthcoming eighth edition, I’m told, he and fellow enthusiast Turlough Crowe will set out “to prove that William Bulfin’s mysterious bike rider, comrade, and guide in [the tower chapter of] Rambles of Eirinn is none other than Griffith”.
More generally, Cormac promises to “break the omerta which has surrounded Griffith’s visit to the tower in Sandycove of Sunday 11th September 1904″. He adds: “Neither Gogarty, Joyce, Trench, or Griffith ever mentioned it.”
The latest issue of Cut & Paste will be published at the Joyce Centre in Dublin on Monday next. It can be bought from printwellbooks.com for €7.
